NOVUS NY, the resident contemporary music orchestra of “expert and versatile musicians” (New Yorker) at Trinity Wall Street, welcomes violinist Katie Hyun as its new concertmaster this week. She replaces Owen Dalby, who resigned the position shortly after becoming the newest member of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. A founding member of the award-winning Amphion String Quartet (ASQ), as well as founder and Artistic Director of the Quodlibet Ensemble chamber orchestra, the versatile Hyun is already a regular on the NOVUS NY roster, and has also played baroque violin with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, the Sebastians, and New York Baroque Incorporated. She takes over the concertmaster position on April 21, and soon thereafter, on April 25, retires from the ASQ, which was founded at Yale in 2009. Hyun has appeared as a soloist with the Houston Symphony, the Dallas Chamber Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Columbia Festival Orchestra, as well as with the Busan Sinfonietta and Incheon Philharmonic in South Korea. With the ASQ she has performed in Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and at the Caramoor Music Festival, among many others. The quartet joined the roster of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two program in the fall of 2013, and its debut album was honored as one of the New York Times’ “Best of 2015.” Hyun is a graduate of the Curtis Institute, the Yale School of Music, and SUNY Stony Brook, and her teachers have included Ani Kavafian, Aaron Rosand, Pamela Frank, and the Emerson Quartet’s Philip Setzer.
Established by Julian Wachner in his inaugural season as Trinity Wall Street’s Director of Music and the Arts in 2011, NOVUS NY has since been an indispensable ingredient in the wide-ranging programming that makes Trinity’s Music & the Arts program “a mini Lincoln Center for classical music downtown” (New Yorker). As the resident orchestra for the Concerts at One Third Thursdays series, NOVUS NY anchors four large-scale concerts this spring in the “Revolutionaries” festival, celebrating Alberto Ginastera’s centennial. In March they performed Ginastera’s Cantata para América mágica, scored for solo soprano and a monumental 53 percussion instruments, along with Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces. The New York Times review, marveling at the forces marshaled for the Ginastera, noted that “this is a sonic landscape as sensitive as it is muscular, and both those qualities were present in the vibrant performance led by Mr. Wachner, featuring players from the Trinity ensemble Novus NY.”